THE OZ FACTOR: A SETTING A STAGE

Most UAP and entity encounters are quite transient—lasting seconds to just a few minutes. The subset of abduction encounters last minutes to hours, many times with amnesia periods; the content of these become very complex when eventually recalled consciously or by hypnotic regression.[1] Excluding the “bedroom abduction,” which is usually heralded by paralysis and a blue-white light, many, perhaps most of the times, the objects (I’m including the “entities” under objects) will materialize slowly before the percipients’ eyes, as if it is gathering energy to become observable. This is usually preceded by what researcher Jenny Randles termed the “Oz factor,” or a noted stillness and silence to the environment, along with a “charged” atmosphere.[2] This “silence bubble” may not be an actual stifling of sound but a change in the brain’s chemistry or electrical functioning, especially in the temporal lobes. 

This alteration in the witness’ consciousness before, during, or after the experience is perhaps the most important factor in Other encounters. Many undergo a feeling of apprehension, a sense that “something has changed” in the air or light, the hearing is affected, the hair stands on end, paralysis occurs, heart rate increases, just before (and sometimes hours before) an encounter.[3] At the onset of the experience their attention may be drawn to the anomalous phenomena without overt sensory prelude—“something made me look up” or “I felt a presence behind me.” The inner ear condition manifests as if the ears have been blocked, blotting out all sound and accompanied by a kind of slowing of time, and often a buzzing, grinding, humming, or popping sound when the percipient loses consciousness or proceeds to have a missing time episode. The Oz factor figures in hundreds, if not thousands, of encounter reports.

The events that follow it seem to happen in a bubble estranged from reality, as if emphasizing the core encounter.[4] Then the real show begins, whether a UAP or apparition or cryptid sighting.

This ASC may indicate the onset of a condition called a metachoric hallucination. In a metachoric hallucination, an imaginary scene is set, not unlike a stage. The world perceived about oneself is a rough mental “copy” overlaying the world during the event’s duration. There are no boundaries between what is “real” and what is internally generated imagery; one can converse with hallucinatory people, operate machinery such as imaginary cars, etc.[5] I suppose one could call it a waking dream, a strong state of hypnagogia. It may be this mental state, in which anything is possible, that UAP, apparition, cryptid, and abduction experiences happen. As we will shortly see in cognitive studies, there is ample time in the gap between the generation of subconscious imagery and the moment of its conscious experience for very complex hallucinations to spontaneously assemble themselves.[6] We must admit the degree to which reality shifts from normality to a metachoric hallucination is a very nebulous transition—again, like the shift into hypnagogia or from hypnagogia into the first sleep stage. It may be definitive of it that the transition is not noticed at all, in which case would it mean the anomaly occurs in a phenomenologically normal state of mind. But this is doubtful. So what then is the difference?

The difference is the content of this “metachoric overlay” to the real scene, which utterly surprises, terrifies, or fascinates the percipient. Most importantly, stereotyped imagery often occurs.

This mental state can account for nearly everything reported in “high strange” encounters. That is its appeal—as well as its drawback. First, how could the brain project a 360-degree simulation of the world in which the anomaly is the only thing noticed as unusual? Why would it set such a complete stage? Or are only certain features of this imaginal world highlighted during a metachoric episode, and the “blanks” that are filled in (the ground, trees, house surroundings, etc.) not directly experienced, but assumed to have been there by the percipient afterward? What induces the line between the normal sensory experience of one’s surroundings and the anomalous elements within this encompassing hallucination? What do these lines and anomalies mean, when the metachoric experience itself is so anomalous?

Electromagnetic fields can induce a variety of changes to the temporal lobes of the brain, creating symptoms identical to the Oz factor—but minus the richly detailed Other-visitation narratives. Attempts in the laboratory to simulate alien abductions and apparitions via electrical temporal lobe stimulation have failed to adequately capture the complexity and symbolic and narrative wealth of a genuine experience, as we shall see.[7] 

Jenny Randles’s fellow British researcher Hilary Evans advanced the idea that “parallel tracks” exist between an individual’s conscious and subconscious. Evans proceeded from the assumption that the rational ego of the experiencers’ minds do not believe the abduction experiences are real (in the sense that they may be metachoric in nature), yet a deeper, more vital part of the psyche does believe, on the level of myth.[8] Thus for Evans the reality-testing function becomes overridden by a “spiritual need to re-enchant the world,” and a subconscious need or instinct drives the change into belief.

Evans has never tried to explain in physical terms how such a thing can occur. Nor did Jung, for that matter. I now will attempt it.

A TRANSLATION INTO CURRENT SCIENCE

Neurons operate digitally—that is, they are binary in action: they either fire or do not fire, akin to a computer producing a string of 1s and 0s. These fields of binary neuronal activity, however, give rise to smooth, analog experience—a coherent sense of time-flow at the level of conscious experience.[9] Pioneering physicists such as Henry Stapp, whose theory we will shortly examine, put forth the conjecture that unobservable quantum activity below the level of synapse-dendrite networks cascades itself into fields of action within brain areas that can then be described by Erwin Schrodinger’s wave-function equation. This combined action of billions of neurons acts to help produce conscious experience of both the subject’s outer world and its inner world of imagination. A neuroscientist can then observe an area of the brain “lighting up” during an fMRI experiment along with the subject’s verbal report that X simultaneously occurred, producing an empirically practical result.

THE HALF-LIFE OF THOUGHTS

When we examine the conscious moment, we find it is inexorably tied up with unconscious processes. Short-term memory has a very brief conscious existence. Within a minute or two, any information brought into short-term memory either “evaporates” or is converted to longer-term memory via the hippocampus.[10] Once relegated to subconscious storage, the memory is subject to many influences. For any complex thought it takes more than a couple of minutes, and one has no way of knowing whether this thought has been unconsciously affected by previous memory patterns in its round-trip from conscious to unconscious and back again.[11] And the thought that takes a couple of minutes and/or involves more than a few elements requires subconscious processing. Even if we knew the action of every neuron and synapse at every instant, we still wouldn’t know what thoughts are actually carried out in consciousness as opposed to occurring subconsciously, but feeling as though they take place in consciousness. Until such a hypothetical time when science uncovers the precise signature for conscious versus unconscious brain activity, any correlation between physical brain states and corresponding mental states is entirely dependent upon what subjects describe. Having a subject tell you that a thought is entirely consciously derived is no more valid been saying that thirst is a conscious decision.

For our purposes we can define a sequence of mental sensations as the experience of a thought. They may be linguistic, imagistic, aural, or all combined. For psychical researcher Frederic Myers, as we will see, it also has to be memorable. We are not aware of the actual mechanics and steps involved; the nuts and bolts of cognition occur in utter silence and invisible synapses and neuronal connections. Below this level, as we will see with Henry Stapp’s theory, the quantum world must be involved.

If we could observe the collapse of Schrodinger’s wave function for each neuron and neurochemical transmission of a brain from sequential time points A-Z, this experimental design would impose discreteness upon the flow—that is, neural events separated by miniscule gaps. Again, most of the time consciousness appears to us as a smooth continuum any way the “time-slice” measurement is made. There is no tiny homunculus within the brain observing the collapse of each subatomic-to-global-brain-area event between the outer and inner worlds; according to Stapp, the quantum cascade at a sub-neuronal level forms coherent probability waves that organize together in brain areas, such as the precuneus, to ultimately collapse into metaphorical “point-like” objects or contents of mental activity.

We would call these thoughts. And if the mind/brain’s contents and the outer world both function according to the wave/particle complementarity, might the line separating the two be a macrocosmic illusion as many quantum physicists and philosophers believe? We will examine this at length soon.

MIND THE GAP

Current neuroscience also tells us there are measurable gaps between the time of an outer stimulus, the activation of neuronal groups irritated by the stimuli, and egoic recognition that the stimulus occurred—the ego that some epiphenomenalists deny is relevant to science or deny exists at all. Mental activation of the autonomic nervous system functions occurs without egoic cognition or willing (this happens practically all the time—in fact, it is the definition of unconscious). A baseball player catches an errant ball flying at his head at 70mph that has barely registered at the corner of his visual field; his automatic action precedes any egoic sensation of “ball-flying-must-catch.”

This phenomena was demonstrated in a lab experiment in 2008 by cognitive scientist Chin Siong Soon and his research team. They determined that motor decisions could be made unconsciously up to 7 seconds before they are performed:

"The involvement of the frontopolar cortex isn’t surprising. It fulfills the role of an executive manager and is involved in retrieving memories and controlling other high-level parts in the brain. Soon thinks that it is the source of the decision itself, with the precuneus simply storing the decision until it reaches a conscious level. When he changed his experiment so that volunteers were shown a cue to tell them when to make their choice, the frontopolar cortex still showed predictive activity before the signal, but the precuneus only did so in the time between signal and action.

Soon found, as (Benjamin) Libet did, that the Supplementary Motor Area was also active before the volunteers became conscious about their intentions. But he also showed that its pattern of activity can predict when the final decision is made. Again, this information is available at an unconscious level about 5 seconds before the volunteers actually move. The frontopolar and parietal cortex aren’t involved in timing until the few milliseconds before the movement, so it seems that the two parts of the brain have different and complementary duties. One shapes the outcome of a choice and the other affects its timing" (emphasis added).[12]

This work built upon a famous study by Benjamin Libet in the 1983, as mentioned in the quotation. Much more crude in setup, Libet’s experiments determined that the brain’s supplementary motor area reacted one half to a full second before subjects pushed a button when a clock’s second hand hit a certain point. The difference is that Soon and his colleagues were able to map the electrical patterns in the frontopolar cortex that corresponded to the eventual movements.

 Egoic cognition or re-cognition paradoxically can also occur in the mind without any concurrent sensory activation, such as the eyes reacting to an outer stimulus. This has been demonstrated in the many cases of blindsight, in which persons cortically blind in one eye due to brain damage have the ability to perceive stimuli in their “blank” areas with guesses that far outweigh statistical randomness. In these cases, again, the scientist must rely on the person’s verbal report that they sensed the stimuli during the experiment. Some part of their brain unconsciously registers the object’s presence and translates it into a signal that the ego (or rather the frontopolar, parietal cortex and precuneus) cognizes, making a verbal report possible.[13]

Dream researcher Robert Stickgold recruited a set of 27 people to play the video game Tetris for seven hours for three days to determine whether the memory of the experiences imprinted well enough to occur in that night’s hypnagogic state and REM sleep; 10 of them familiar with the game, while 7 were novices. In addition, he included among the amateurs 5 people suffering from brain damage that resulted in permanent short-term amnesia for them (a type called anterograde depicted in the film Memento). These persons would have to relearn how to play the game afresh every day, from the general rules to the use of the buttons.

Yet several of the amnesiacs reported seeing figures resembling Tetris blocks in their sleep-onset dreaming period despite having no conscious recollection of the game. In one instance, Stickgold discovered an amnesiac subject placed her hands in the correct positions before being told, once again, how to play the game. He conjectured that her procedural memory remained in some way intact; according to the subject, her conscious self played no part in placing her hands on the controls correctly.

In a very real physiological sense, what we’ve incorporated in memory from the past also significantly affects how we experience the present and form new memories. “Experiences are encoded by brain networks whose connections have already been shaped by previous encounters with the world,” says (dream researcher) Daniel Schacter. “This pre-existing knowledge powerfully influences how we encode and store new memories, thus contributing to the nature, texture, and quality of what we will recall of the moment.” We remember only what we have encoded and what the brain decides to encode depends on our past experiences, knowledge, and needs.[14]

So the path of short-term to long-term memory at any given moment is conditioned by past experience in an unconscious manner. Does this imply a resonance at work between present experience, working memory of the immediate past, and the set of memories in the deep “autobiographical” and “procedural” past? Neuroscientists would say that some present experience activates energy patterns in groups of neurons (probably tens of millions or more) that in turn trigger a previously-imprinted set of neuronal patterns, giving impetus for the present experience to be recalled more efficiently via the previously strengthened networks of neuronal groups—or their electrical signature. The former, “pre-conscious” or implicit memory triggers the latter, subconscious memory.[15] Yet the whole operation is done unconsciously or automatically, and the validity of this unconscious automatism in the explanation rests on the matching of the pre-conscious working memory with the older memory. Sensorily, the putatively divisible operation experience-trigger-recall in deep memory occurs in less than a second, and yet the conscious experience is, most of the time, continuous. This is a mystery.

STAPP’S QUANTUM ZENO EFFECT AND NON-LOCAL AWARENESS

As Henry Stapp points out in his book Mindful Universe,[16] most neuroscientists and psychologists model the brain and its sub-systems as a mechanistic object. They use the Newtonian cause-and-effect framework of the macrocosmic world with little or no consideration of the revolution in physics wrought by quantum theory for over a century.

According to Stapp, we can imagine something and hold it in our minds only through intention. But this is a mysterious phenomenon. We perform actions consciously through the same process: by holding an intention that transforms itself into a bodily action, no matter how brief. He describes this “willing” as a cascade of potential microstates that occur at a subatomic level in neurons—an initial imaginal impulse of one’s performing the action, microseconds in duration, that is then repeated/cascaded many billions of times, what is called the quantum Zeno effect (QZE): the paradoxical notion that every distance between two points can be halved infinitely. But Stapp uses the paradox in a reversed sense: the initial image or impulse, welled up from the unconscious/subconscious and into consciousness, multiplies itself in a fraction of a second into awareness. When the imaginal impulse builds to a critical level of neurochemical electrical activity (across the area of the brain associated with that particular action) it then becomes subject to the binary yes/no state “perform action/do not perform action” or “hold this image in mind.” This corresponds to Soon’s results we saw in section one, with the frontopolar cortex being the origination point of the Zeno effect, the precuneus being the build-up area, and the frontopolar and parietal cortex being the areas where the “perform/do not perform” decision is made possible (and indeed, since Soon and his colleagues were able to map this process, it shows that these areas can be measured in a classical, Newtonian manner).

But Stapp rejects the 150-year old vogue of epiphenomenalism in neuroscience and psychology that reduces all mind-states to only these chemical and electrical exchanges in the brain: 

"A template for action is defined to be a macroscopic (extending over a large portion of the brain) pattern of neurological activity that, if held in place for sufficiently long, will tend to produce a brain activity that will tend to produce an intended experienced feedback. This pattern of brain activity is the neural correlate (specified by a process one action—see page 87) of a conscious effort to act in an intended way. William James (1892, page 227) says that 'no object can catch our attention except by the neural machinery. But the amount of attention that an object receives after it has called our attention is another matter. It often takes effort to keep mind up on it. We feel we can make more or less of the effort as we choose…This feeling…Will deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade away more quickly.'

Effort is a particular feature of consciousness that we feel we can control, and that has the effect of intensifying experience. Hence it is reasonable to suppose that increasing effort increases the rate at which conscious events are occurring. If the rate becomes sufficiently great then the quantum Zeno effect will, according to the quantum laws, kick in, and the repetitious interventions of the probing actions will tend to hold in place the template for action. That effect will, in turn, tend to make the intended action occur. By virtue of this dynamically explained causal effect of willful conscious effort upon brain activity, trial and error learning should hone the correlation between the consciously experienced intention and an associated template for action that produces that produces, via the physical laws, the intended feedback. This explains dynamically the capacity of an effortful intention to bring about its intended consequence." [17] (emphasis added)

A “probing action” as Stapp calls it is simply the will brought to bear that may or may not activate the Zeno effect to create and hold an image in the mind or an action of the body.[18] However, if we don’t posit something such as a probing action initiating thought that is not itself a part of the system, we are left with an infinitely regressing chain of QZEs that have no origination point. We will presently examine this.

This process occurs so quickly and automatically we have no conscious center or ego inducing the first image that reinforces itself to the critical point. In other words, our rote, everyday activities do not demand discrete and conscious decision-impetus, or we would spend our days, for instance, simply willfully building the mental energies to transform a million separate muscular actions to get out of bed and dressed—inefficient from an evolutionary standpoint. Communication between intention and action appears instantaneous and smooth. As Stapp points out, 

Many neuroscientists who study the relationship of consciousness to brain processes want to believe that classical physics will provide an adequate rational foundation for that task. But classical physics has bottom-up causation, and the direct rational basis for the claim that classical physics is applicable to the full workings of the brain rests on the basic presumption that it is applicable at the microscopic level. However, empirical evidence about what is actually happening at the trillions of synapses on the billions of neurons in a conscious brain is virtually nonexistent, and, according to the uncertainty principle, empirical evidence is in principle unable to justify the claim that deterministic behavior actually holds in the brain at the microscopic (ionic) scale. Thus the claim that classical determinism holds in living brains is empirically indefensible: sufficient evidence neither does, nor cannot in principal, exist.[19]

Soon’s measurements of precuneus activity are made on a Newtonian scale. The macroscopic world of objects around us (including the areas of the brain) obeys laws that appear so different in kind from that of the quantum world of which Stapp speaks as to constitute two separate cosmoses that yet exist entwined, like the balanced duality of the Taoist yin-yang. Yet the macrocosm emerges or emanates from this latter in a way of which science has no inkling. We may conclude that subconscious impulses are always at work in consciousness at the level of the Zeno effect, blending (and perhaps causing) thoughts to come to consciousness, either fully or partially. It may be possible that such subconscious influence is blended with memory as the brain decodes the imprints of past events in the present, as one thinks and acts.

Stapp suggests that radically indeterminate quantum neural states exists before willpower enters the picture and “forces” an image in the mind:

"Some quantum physicists want to justify basing neuroscience on classical physics by suggesting that once the neural activity reaches a classically describable level, say at the firing of a neuron (i.e., the triggering of an action potential), one may assume that the quantum jump from “potential” to “actual” has occurred, and hence that one can deal simply with the actualities of the neurons firing, and ignore their quantum underpinnings." [20]

Stapp uses mathematician John Von Neumann’s terminology with regard to describing experiments that use the Schrodinger wave function equation. According to von Neumann’s vernacular, a process 2 intervention is the recognition that a continuous smear of superposed quantum events exists in a defined field that can only be clarified (“collapsed”) to apprehension (in our context, to become accessible to consciousness and measurement) by process 1 interventions, which are interventions by an experimenter—or, in the widest extrapolation of von Neumann’s term, an observer simply choosing to focus upon objects in its environment or even those that appear in her mind. This is done via the QZE.

This process 1 intervention is equivalent to our neuroscientist making an observation that a physical event has occurred in a subject’s brain concurrent with an external stimulus, such as a jolt of electrical current.

In one of the standard interpretations (Niels Bohr’s), the field of quantum flux is collapsed via Schrodinger’s wave equation to a definite state only once it is measured. It requires an observer. Similarly, Stapp believes that the thoughts and actions of a mind reduce from quantum flux to definable entities via the Zeno effect, and are thenceforth conscious and/or measurable in the brain. What is measurable about the brain’s activity in such a process is the action-potentials of synapse networks as in the states firing/not firing (which Soon’s experiments made use of) and again, this is a classical, Newtonian measurement. Prior to this, we have an example of Schrodinger’s hypothetical black box: 

The occurrences of such reductions are logically possible because the state of the brain represents not an evolving material substance but rather an evolving set of potentialities for a psychophysical event to occur. The occurrences of such reductions are logically necessary because the expanding ensemble of almost classical states is a continuous structure that must be decomposed into a collection of discrete alternatives, each associated with a distinct kind of experience.

It is only by means of this partitioning that the theory is tied securely to human experiences, and to the empirically validated rules of quantum theory. The smear of almost–classical possibilities must be partitioned, prior to each experience, into a specified collection of components at least one of which corresponds to a distinctive experience, or lack thereof. (emphasis added)[21]

THE NON-LOCAL MAP: YOU CAN GET THERE FROM ANYWHERE

We must also keep in mind that when one speaks of the subatomic realm we are speaking of what physicists have discovered is a non-local realm. At this level of existence it has been shown as conceivable that any chosen subatomic particle in the universe may be in faster-than-light-speed “communication” with every other particle.[22] The non-locality thesis is based in part on experiments done to test Bell’s inequality theorem regarding ---.

Physicist Alain Aspect provisionally proved photon entanglement in 1982. Another team eradicated the loopholes noticed in Aspect’s experiment and proved it in 2015.[23] The tests essentially negate the idea of “local realism,” that is, that one finitely bounded area in space-time is unconnected on a molecular, atomic, or subatomic scale to any other arbitrarily defined space. The physicists proved this in 2015 by creating a photon that hits a beam-splitter and is sent it off in opposite directions. The polarization of one half of the photon was changed (polarization is the spatial orientation of a photon’s wavelike aspect as it travels away from its point of origin). The other, sister photon changed its polarization at the exact instant. This would then seem to contradict Einstein’s idea that superluminal speed is the cosmic limit. How was the information of the second half’s repolarization transmitted?

This quantum entanglement is equivalent to the smeared superposition of electron/photon wave-states prior to experimental observation of Schrodinger’s wave-equation (the probing action 2, in Stapp’s/von Neumann’s terms). The split photon may be considered as a wave spread out through a field “beneath” or "outside" local space-time that is collapsed to two points having the same polarized state when the measurement occurs.

I suggest that this non-local realm is the level from which not only our thoughts and actions originate via the Zeno effect, but also that from which the images and ideas I will eventually describe would coalesce into consciousness. There is a gap in our understanding of how such a seemingly ever-moving and intermeshed field of quanta organizes itself into our observable, mesoscopic-to-macroscopic world of forms—that is, how it is held by the strong gravitational force into atoms, into molecules, into elements, into compounds, into catalysts, etc., that make up the cosmos.

Between the sensory organs, the brain, and the outer world, wave functions are, in potential, simultaneously collapsing in a smooth manner (on a macro-to-mesoscale); they are simply not being measured in von Neumann’s process/probing action 1. It would be impossible (and absurd) to measure every differentiated quantum event occurring between a subject’s body and everything other than that body in the known universe. But these average themselves out and appear as our reality: the world. We as conscious beings experience this flow effortlessly as time. There must necessarily be something in between the sensing mind (observation of the world, amounting to a continuous stream of Zeno effect/process 1 interventions) and everything else that renders conscious to the mind the phenomenologically smooth field of experience.

Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory seeks to resolve this problem. In short, according to Penrose and Hameroff the microtubulins in the sheaths around neurons function as wave-function collapsers, working in coordination across the entire brain, and are the source of consciousness. This quantum activity within the deepest levels of the brain is, at a Schrodingerian scale, structurally and statistically the same as that underlying everything else in the observable universe—thus may be the connecting link between consciousness and an outer world:

"Another feature of quantum systems is quantum inseparability, or non-locality, which implies that all quantum objects that have once interacted are in some sense still connected! When two quantum systems (such as the brain/body and a tree, for instance) have interacted, their wave functions become “phase entangled” so that when one system’s wave function is collapsed, the other system’s wave function, no matter how far away, instantly collapses as well. The non-local connection (“quantum entanglement”) is instantaneous, independent of distance and implies that the quantum entities, by sharing a wave function, are indivisible."[24] (clarification added)

I would suggest that this applies as the interface between the Zeno effect’s large-scale wave-function collapse in the brain simultaneous with/entangled with the wave function collapse of everything else inside the subject’s awareness, including everything in the outer world. This difference in scale may be likened to our distinction between digital versus analog.

The future ever appears to us as the present, at any given measurable instant. It is no leap to conjecture that the quantum “flux” at the sub-synaptic/microtubulin level is filtering continuous quantum superpositions of the future state of the universe by means of a looping action with the physical brain and is entangled with the looping action of everything else. The “larger” Self, that is, the brain’s particular unconscious state (the pre-Zeno effect) that filters the quantum field at the measurable time x, collapses the singular phenomenal wave function of this time x into something called the “present” but which is yet, paradoxically, always already the past in terms of the measuring device. The present would exist then only relative to the measuring device—for instance, calculating concurrent brain activities that have, at an infinitesimal instant, already passed by. But to the mind, whose contents are always smeared in the entangled, process 2 superpositional continuum, the present is completely without a time sense. It is immeasurable but by means of the points of a subject’s collapsed intervention 1 conscious experience of the world.

On a classically-measurable scale, our brain-states receive impressions of our environment and monitor our internal states through a vibratory resonance between the “internal” energy and “external,” I believe, by way of a third phenomenal field. This field would bridge the classical physical world of Newton with that of Max Planck’s quanta. Again, were it to be measured as a closed system on a quantum scale, this resonance would be seen as a single feedback loop of simultaneous, near-infinite wave function-collapses, one in which the inner and outer worlds blend together as one. It is this continuous feedback loop in which a singular-seeming reality is created for a consciousness, memory is imprinted, memory can be recalled, the imagination engaged, etc.

THE HOLOMOVEMENT, THE IMPLICATE ORDER, AND THE FORMAL HIERARCHY

Physicists define forces in terms of units of measurement. These allow phenomena like heat or light frequency or mass to be described. To make classical, measurements, physicists must bracket the object of their study from its relationship to other phenomena. Their observations become translatable to fellow scientists when rendered in mathematical form.

From a deeper standpoint, however, these measuring units are only equivalences. The bracketing method that physicists use is a temporary placeholder used for a limited period of time for a specific purpose.

Physicist David Bohm long ago conjectured that a hidden order must by necessity exist behind everything that is explicit to consciousness.[25] From the standpoint of this implicate order, though, there would be no qualitative difference between consciousness and any of the elements (or emanations) of the implicate order whose aspects (measuring units) physicists study:

"…Bohm believes that dividing the universe up into living and nonliving things also has no meaning. Animate and inanimate matter are inseparably interwoven, and life, too, is enfolded throughout the totality of the universe. Even a rock is in some way alive, says Bohm, for life and intelligence are present not only in all of matter, but in “energy,” “space,” “time,” “the fabric of the entire universe,” and everything else we abstract out of the holomovement and mistakenly view as separate things." [26]

 In other words, mind and matter both are manifestations of a common field that emanates different properties under different experimental vantage points. The two aspects mind and matter exist inside an interdependent continuum; mind appears as conscious experience, and conscious experience appears as the parallel Newtonian, classically-measured brain matter activity we and scientists have been examining. They are the same things under differing descriptive vocabularies. 

Descriptions of mind and matter—and “normal” experience vs. “abnormal” experiences—then become a question of what emergent properties from the implicate order, such as those found in the chemical elements or an electrical charge, are under a particular scale of scrutiny a physicist or psychologist chooses to examine. The QZE-to-fMRI/consciousness scale would be one example. The polarized photons of the 2015 Bell inequality experiment would be another, the quantum action of microtubulins collapsing in tandem a third, etc. 

David Bohm called the phenomenal-to-consciousness perceptible changes of this implicate order the “holomovement.”

Generalizing, so as to emphasize undivided wholeness, we can say that the holomovement, which is an unbroken and undivided totality, ‘carries’ implicate order. In certain cases, we can abstract particular aspects of the holomovement (e.g. light, electrons, sound, etc.), but more generally, all forms of the holomovement merge and are inseparable. Thus in its totality, the holomovement is not limited in any specifiable way at all. It is not required to conform to any particular order, or to be bounded by any particular measure. Thus, the holomovement is indefinable and immeasurable.[27]

THE HOLOGRAPHIC HYPOTHESIS

The one part missing from Stapp’s account of how thoughts originate seemingly fully-formed in the brain via the Zeno effect can be answered by what Bohm and Karl Pribram call the “holographic theory” of the universe:

Bohm uses his idea of the implicate order, the deeper and nonlocal level of existence from which our entire universe springs, to echo the sentiment: “every action starts from an intention in the implicate order. The imagination is already the creation of the form; it already has the intention and the germs of all the movements needed to carry it out. And it affects the body and so on, so that has creation takes place in that way from the subtler levels of the implicate order, it goes through them until it manifests in the explicate.” In other words in the implicate order, as in the brain itself, imagination and reality are ultimately indistinguishable, and it should therefore come as no surprise to us that images in the mind can ultimately manifest as realities in the physical body.[28] (emphasis added)

But this leaves out something. When Bohm’s idea is brought together with Stapp’s Zeno effect, the account is incomplete. There must be a medium between the implicate and explicate (QZE) orders. Why do countless unbidden, fully formed images suddenly impinge on the minds of artists, say, or appear as veridical sounds in the head of a musician, or even appear as UAP or djinn to the average person? If an implicate continuum exists and manifests local phenomena as our thoughts, through what medium do they achieve form in the mind/brain via the QZE? It is implied by Bohm that the “subtle levels” of the implicate order precede or even cause images, thoughts, and intention in the human mind—but this would then render free will as originating in the mind as an illusion. So we must look closer at the holographic theory.

            It began with neurophysiologist Karl Pribram puzzling over neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s engram conjecture that everything ever experienced by a person is recorded in their brain. Penfield had electrically stimulated parts of epileptics’ brains while they were in surgery and received detailed accounts of memory replays (engrams) from earlier moments in the patients’ lives, sometimes going back to early childhood.[29] Pribram’s work with psychologist Karl Lashley added to the mystery: Lashley had discovered that maze-running rats could still remember the paths they’d figured out despite having both the memory and learning portions of their brains removed—and even having the entire organ rearranged in their skulls. This indicated that the physical substrate was not where the engrams of experience reside; memories are distributed somehow throughout the entire brain and can be retrieved despite damage to the areas where they should reside. Further, in cases of cerebellar agenesis, a person is born with an incomplete or even entirely missing cerebellum, which controls motor movement of the limbs and the ability to speak—yet there are people, such as the Chinese woman found in 2014, where these capacities are only impaired and not entirely absent, as should be the case if the substrate was entirely responsible for the motor competency.[30] There are also startling examples such as the man who suffered from hydrocephaly when a child then at 44 in 2007 was discovered to have only 30-50% of his brain intact, the rest being simply cerebrospinal fluid. He still had an IQ of 75 and led a normal life until the discovery.[31] A boy born in Scotland in 2013 with only a brainstem and a fluid-filled skull is now four and can speak, despite the medical opinion that he should still have only the capacities of a newborn. Another child born in 2014 lacks both a skull and brain and can speak.[32] This implies that something more than the physical matter of the brain holds the key to consciousness and memory.

When Karl Pribram learned of the holography’s capabilities to store information, he found the model he was looking for. The amount of information a brain must store in memory almost exceeds comprehension:  2.8×10²⁰ bits of information (20¹⁹ bits, or 2.16 exabytes, several orders of magnitude larger than the largest computer storage at present possible). On average, there are 100 billion neurons in the brain, with 10,000 individual synaptic connections between them that can each produce “switching” actions 100 times a second. Add to this the billion tubulins[33] within a single neuron that switch in the megahertz range of a million times a second and it yields somewhere near 10¹⁶ operations per second per neuron in the brain.[34] So multiply 10¹⁶ operations per 100 billion neurons and you get close to 10²⁷ operations per second—potentially, that is. Such level of power is not used constantly; this would make the “computing capacity” of the brain’s average working state larger than its hypothesized bit-memory if the switching operations of microtubules are taken into consideration.

Although there are a wide variety of specialized neurons, each individual soma-dendrite-axon uses on average 6 to 7 millivolts of energy per second; the brain as a whole uses 20 watts in normal operation. According to Landauer’s principle on entropy in the non-reversible nature of computation, the brain then could not exceed 10²¹ watts in energy consumption.[35] Taking microtubules into the assessment, the amount of work (and hence entropy, that is, the loss of further bit-transformational power) within the neuronal system, the 10²⁷ number of operations would require 10 megawatts of electrical power—far more than has been measured in the brain’s use of electricity. If we take the microtubules into the “bit-processing” picture of the brain’s operational capacity, where is this additional energy coming from? I think Talbot and Bohm both would have said that the mind filters what it needs potentially from a holographic-like field, reducing the physical memory storage capacity drastically:

Interestingly, holograms also possess a fantastic capacity for information storage. By changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. Any image thus recorded can be retrieved simply by illuminating the film with the laser beam possessing the same angle as the original two beams. By employing this method researchers have calculated that a one-inch-square of film can store the same amount of information contained in 50 Bibles![36]

            The holographic model would solve the seemingly intractable problem of memory storage. It paints for us a picture that evokes a resonance between a brain-state and what Pribram claims is a set of Fourier-transform interference patterns (memories) that reside somewhere “outside” the physical brain.

Many experiments have been done showing that our brains utilize Fourier transformations that mediate between our senses and the world. A Fourier transformation is a way of speaking about a frequency domain of vibrations in a bounded sense (whether acoustic, electromagnetic, molecular, etc.); the signal is converted into a mathematical function then reassembled into a simulation/image of the outer phenomena that creates experience.

Despite the popularity of this view, the (physiological psychologists) DeValoises felt it was only a partial truth. To test their assumption they used Fourier equations to convert plaid and checkerboard patterns into simple waveforms. And they tested to see how the brain cells in the visual cortex responded to these new wave-form images. What they found was that the brain cells responded not to the original patterns, but to the Fourier translations of the patterns. Only one conclusion could be drawn. The brain was using Fourier mathematics—the same mathematics holography employed—to convert images into the Fourier language of waveforms.

The DeValoises’s discovery was subsequently confirmed by numerous other laboratories around the world, and although it did not provide absolute proof the brain was a hologram, it supplied enough evidence to convince Pribram his theory was correct. Spurred on by the idea that the visual cortex was responding not to patterns but to the frequency of various waveforms, he began to reassess the role frequency played in the other senses.

It didn’t take long for him to realize that the importance of this role had perhaps been overlooked by 20^th-century scientists. Over a century before the DeValoises’s discovery, the German physiologist and physicist Hermann Von Helmholtz had shown that the ear was a frequency analyzer. More recent research revealed that our sense of smell seems to be based on what are called osmic frequencies. (Neuroscientist Georg Von) Bekesy’s work had clearly demonstrated that our skin is sensitive to frequencies of vibration, and he even produced some evidence that taste may involve frequency analysis. Interestingly, Bekesy also discovered that the mathematical equations that enabled him to predict how his subjects would respond to various frequencies of vibration are also of the Fourier genre.[37] (emphasis added)

Critics have attacked this idea of Fourier frequency domain transformation analysis; it seems they only do so because of its association via Pribram, Bohm, and Talbot to the iconoclastic idea as a holographic universe in which both subject and object are two aspects of the same thing (the holomovement), with the Fourier mathematical process being merely a prop separating the “membrane” between consciousness and the world. Yet this conjecture fits the experimental evidence.

For Pribram, this synthesis made him realize that the objective world does not exist, at least not in the way we are accustomed to believing. What is “out there” is a vast ocean of waves and frequencies, and reality looks concrete to us only because our brains are able to take this holographic blur and convert it into the sticks and stones and other familiar objects that make up our world. How is the brain (which itself is composed of frequencies of matter) able to take something as insubstantial as a blur of frequencies and make it seem solid to the touch? “The kind of mathematical process that Bekesy simulated with his vibrators is basic to how our brains construct our image of a world out there,” Pribram states.

In other words, the smoothness of a piece of fine china and the feel of beach sand beneath our feet are really just elaborate versions of the phantom limb syndrome.

According to Pribram this does not mean there aren’t china cups and grains of beach sand out there. It simply means that a china cup has two very different aspects to its reality. When it is filtered through the lens of our brain it manifests as a cup. But if we could get rid of our lenses, we’d experience it as an interference pattern. Which one is real and which is illusion? “Both are real to me,” says Pribram, “or, if you want to say, neither of them are real.”

This state of affairs is not limited to china cups. We, too, have two very different aspects to our reality. We can view ourselves as physical bodies moving through space. Or we can view ourselves as a blur of interference patterns enfolded throughout the cosmic hologram. Bohm believes the second point of view might even be the more correct, for to think of ourselves as a holographic mind/brain looking at a holographic universe is again an abstraction, an attempt to separate two things that ultimately cannot be separated.[38] (emphasis added)

Pribram believed memory was holographically encoded by way of the brain; its many superposed energy patterns potentially contain a record of one’s entire life. Densely-packed neurons’ continuous firing produces a wavelike pattern that is able to encode the interference patterns of the outer world into consciousness experience and hence memory. Penfield’s stimulation of the parts of the brain always evoked seemingly random, “meaningless” scenes from his patients’ memory-streams (as we noted, this would be expected, given that most of our lives are composed of mundane moments). His probes decoded random memories that were originally encoded Fourier transforms created via the quantum Zeno effect and held stabilized in consciousness and into memory.

Thus the senses of the human body transform the EM signals of the outer world into wave patterns and reconstruct them through the resonant “waves-to-points” of mind, then the brain, as holistic, irreducible representations. Since the mind (or rather, Mind) exists at “two places” simultaneously as the china cup and as a potentially decodable signal in the brain, entangled in this implicate Mind until the individual’s “will” (the Zeno effect) collapse the wave function and causes the eyes to look upon/create from waves the cup, it is the primary field. The cup and observers are functions of this greater mind. The interaction between the inner (the brain’s translated Fourier representations) and outer (the Fourier waves) is where the metachoria exists, a place of preexisting looping “paths” that is always present yet normally “insensible” to our senses—in more than one manner.

Imagine looking at a pen in your hand. You study it and find it has scratches on its surface. You put it down and out of sight. The QZE was involved in every instant of this action—and the Mind recorded the series of Fourier transforms of the visual and tactile information—which seems to disappear as soon as the pen is placed out of sight. But it isn’t; the entire memory of the action is stored like a hologram in Mind. You may use the QZE to imagine the pen and its scratches but most likely this will be a dull phantom of the experience of looking at it (unless one possessed an eidetic memory, or has a vivid “memory bubble” of it that is near-veridical in clarity).

You again will yourself to pick up the pen and look at it. By the research of Soon et al., combined with the “probing action 1” of the quantum wave frequency field, the mind will anticipate the action and appearance of the pen and “collapse” it back into consciousness, into one’s experience-stream. Its nicks and color and shape are once again imprinted holographically, resonating with the earlier phenomenal sequence and strengthening the memory-hologram. Done enough times, one might finally have a very “realistic” visual representation of the pen that the brain’s neural activity can “materialize” via the QZE. The holographic image is conjured and has left a signature upon neural pathways in the physical brain.

The prefrontal cortex is active in executing imagination as a willed phenomenon. fMRI studies have shown that the occipital cortex and inferotemporal cortex are both very active during true hallucinations, but imagination such as that with imaging the pen that utilizes the prefrontal cortex is thus “predictable;” it would bring forth no surprises…We cannot escape the fact that imagination is used all the time, in the least gleanings of our surroundings, and projecting the future (in as simple a task as laying out the trajectory of one’s hand towards the pen) or recalling the past (the working memory that utilizes proteins to strengthen the neuronal connective patterns to induce long-term memory).

There have been many instances of massive brain trauma such as meningitis, strokes, bullet wounds, and dementia leading to instant expansions of talents and abilities in addition to damage.[39] This should not be at all possible, especially its suddenness after the injury, under the physicalist paradigm. The filter model/holographic hypothesis answers this by perhaps explaining that the rerouted electrical activity resulting from physical damage changed the spectrum of frequency domain reception available to the afflicted person’s brain. An entire area of the “enfolded” holographic field pertaining to, say, competency at playing the piano became available to the wounded person’s consciousness. (Why a musical, mathematical, or visual arts area and not another part of the field became conscious is an interesting and perhaps unanswerable question).

In its first sense, we only focus on a handful of things at a time; we may eat a candy bar while sitting in a chair and reading the newspaper. There is limited sensory input entering both the active, attentive brain and sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous systems; there is limited “information” flowing into and out of the person. By way of the Zeno effect we motivate our eyes to scan the lines of the paper and raise the candy to our mouth while everything else, including the sensation of sitting and our sense of placement in the environment, recedes to “insensibility” in the background as we are absorbed in our activity.

In the other sense, there are always energy frequencies waving through us. First and most obvious are the EM fields of the earth, the sun, our electrical/microwave appliances (Smart Meters, cellphones), and military and weather radar/microwaves. These are (for most of us) entirely unapprehended by consciousness or even the unconscious/sympathetic nervous systems, because our bodies have more or less achieved equilibrium with their presence; they normally do not reach a critical level (or overload) creating an interruption of the normal sympathetic nervous system.

To return to our discussion of memory storage and bit-processing, think of the actions involved with consciously learning a skill; it could be riding a bike or doing a backflip or making a bank shot in billiards. An observation of someone performing each of these actions is not necessary for a person to learn them, nor is even imagining the actions before attempting them (but these would help, of course). Someone had to have done it first, whether intentionally or not; the learner is recapitulating that first action in their attempt at the action.

Complex responses in the brain are required to even attempt the acts. Each attempt could be considered as a single, flowing motion that can, however, be decomposed in the brain’s Fourier transformations of the actions. Once they are performed, they exist in working memory, whether as failures or successes. The more successes are made, the stronger the electro-synaptic connections connected with a success are made on a substrate level of the brain’s motor centers. Periods of sleep have been shown to consolidate memories and rehearse actions in unconscious states—even to the point where the same areas of the brain involved in the physical action are lit up during sleep, but motor actions are sedated by a partial shutdown of the prefrontal cortex by acetylcholine.[40] In any case, after a period of time the action is performed with more successes. It gradually becomes a holistic action without the incremental, step-by-step approach utilized during the first period. The more times the skilled action is performed, the more the conscious parts of it fade or sediment into the background and become invisible (unconscious), so to speak, to the performer; and the more unconscious can become its initiation by will.[41]

The action has become a strong mental-hologram image; I would call it a kind of metachore at this point. According to Stapp, it would be at this point that the Zeno effect could produce such an image from raw memory-image and initiate immediate action; the person could then choose “engage the body in this action” or not. Pribram and perhaps Bohm would add that such mental images work as precursors to neurophysical motion, because they are stored holograms that contain the entirety of the action about to be performed.

To sum up, the implicate order-metachoria-human brain-“outer world projection” scheme is bi-directional; the informational energies from implicate/holographic order to explicate/sensible order form a continuous loop. Metachoric imagery continuously appears within the mind, filling in the “gaps” of analog conscious experience.

But at certain times brain states may be induced by certain “anomalous” Fourier transform frequency waves. Bohm’s implicate order may be directly experienced via deeply altered states in which "anomalous" but often stereotyped metachoric imagery irrupts to consciousness via the Quantum Zeno Effect. Since there is a continuity between the individual mind experiencing this anomalous patterning and the surrounding quantum underpinnings of the environment, a strong energy bond is formed. The aggregate of altered wave functions phenomenologically (may) show up in both the mind and environment as anomalous beings, “vehicles,” or communications. 

Less dramatically, it is also by this same process that simple or complex ideas “arise from nowhere” and appear in an artist’s mind.

Next we will turn to “aberrant” and “outlying” personality traits, such as Dissociative Identity Disorder, and the occasional stupendously superhuman feats that accompany them. This type of “deviance” is on a psychological continuum with psi feats such as telepathy, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, remote viewing, mediumship, and those who experience UAP sightings and abductions.